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Meredith Tax seems very
keen to discredit my arguments about Imperialist Feminism. In her essay on the
“Antis”—a term she coins to describe me, Saadia Toor, and our ilk—she charges
us with being anti-feminist, sectarian, and reductionist. She further states
that we are largely irrelevant, since “few will read us,” but that we are
nevertheless dangerous because we focus our “attack
exclusively on liberal feminism” and don’t understand how to fight against fundamentalism
and for women’s rights.

Before I debunk Tax’s
various distortions of my arguments, let me state clearly where I stand on the
question of Imperialist Feminism.

As I described in my essay
titled “Imperialist feminism and liberalism,” the key focus of Tax’s attack,
the framework of Imperialist Feminism is “based on
the appropriation of women’s rights in the service of empire.” This framework
has a long history that goes back to the 19th century. A range of scholars such
as Lila Abu-Lughod, Reina Lewis, Leila Ahmed, Marnia Lazreg, Rana Khabani,
Saba Mahmood, Lata Mani, and others have written extensively about what has
variously been called colonial feminism, gendered Orientalism and imperial
feminism. If Gayatri Spivak coined the phrase
“White-men-saving-brown-women-from-brown-men,” to describe this phenomenon,
Abu-Lughod in her recent book Do Muslim
Women Need Saving analyzes the development of imperial feminism since then.
She argues that since the Afghan war a new ubiquitous commonsense has emerged
that sees militarism as the means to advance women’s rights.

Historically,
brown women have not been “liberated” by imperial action, as we see from Egypt under British occupation to Afghanistan
under US-NATO occupation. I have therefore argued that the struggle for women’s
liberation should come from below, through global grassroots movements which mobilize
against larger social structures that produce sexism and misogyny. In my lecture at the University of California, Berkeley,
I state that feminists should reject the intervention of imperial states like
the US
and learn the lessons of history.

Certainly the
elite have learned their lessons. A wikileaks exposé of a CIA red cell
propaganda memo shows the spy agency advising European governments on how the
suffering of Afghan women might bolster flagging public support for NATO
occupation of Afghanistan.
They state that “initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women
to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help
to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western
Europe.” This is not new. Colonialism has historically relied on
native spokespersons and native collaborators to ideologically secure the
colonial mission.

This is not
to suggest that Afghan women who speak of the atrocities faced by the Taliban
are automatically “native informants” or collaborators with empire. Women have
a right to speak out about their oppression no matter where they are located.
However, there are those who either consciously or inadvertently enable empire.
Brown Skin, White Masks offers a
trenchant critique of Azar Nafisi, Ayan Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji and others who
peddle women’s rights as a cover for imperial intervention. In short, the
ideology of Imperialist Feminism doesn’t only emerge from elites and their
institutions in the West but from people in and from the Global South as well.
Saadia Toor discusses new forms of Imperialist feminism and outlines various
actors, including Meredith Tax, who have reshaped this discourse and given it
liberal form.

Now let’s look at how Tax
systematically distorts my arguments in order to prove her own (Saadia Toor
will take on Tax’s misrepresentations of her arguments in another piece).

Tax begins her essay by
stating that a new theory has become “influential” among US academic feminists
that blame the feminist movement, particularly white liberal feminists in the
West and their native informants in the global South, for the suffering of
women in Muslim majority countries. She then uses my recent essay
on openDemocracy as an example of this trend.

First off, there is no
such fashionable theory that exclusively blames feminists for the problems
encountered by women in Muslim majority countries. Tax provides absolutely no
citations to back up this claim. Instead, she focuses on my piece which she
distorts to advance her own argument. My piece is about how Imperialist
Feminism as a framework permeates politics, news and culture in the 21st
century. As part of this analysis, I argue that historically liberal feminists
in the West, and their collaborators in the South, have supported imperial
missions due to their flawed understanding of the state (and empire).

Tax completely ignores this
and instead argues that my “evidence” fails to support Tax’s “thesis”! I did
not argue that the Feminist movement is responsible for the suffering of Muslim
women rather I point to how women’s rights in Muslim majority countries need to
be understood in terms of nation, region, class, nationalist politics, the part
played by Islam in political movements, etc. I also highlight how Western
commentators fail to acknowledge the agency of Muslim women and the struggles
for women’s rights, for instance, in “Morocco,
Iran and Egypt.” Tax
conveniently skips over these statements and charges me with ignoring the “the struggles of women against politicized religion in
Muslim-majority countries.”

Tax argues that initially
RAWA did not oppose the US
war. In fact, RAWA activist Tahmeena Faryal in her speaking tour of the US shortly after 9/11 stated clearly her opposition
to the US
bombing campaign. Writing about her talk in Chicago,
a Chicago Tribune article notes that Faryal’s message was that “the people of Afghanistan, particularly women, have been
persecuted for too long, and America’s
bombing campaign is only making their lives worse.”

Additionally, I do not attack
feminism in general much less homogenize various branches of feminist thought. Instead,
I highlight the need for structural analysis. Liberal feminist groups, no
matter their location, tend not to fight against the economic and political
structures of society. As Arundhati Roy notes, while NGO’s in India
have done good work, they have stayed away from challenging neoliberalism. She
argues that the NGO-ization of the women’s movement has made Western liberal
feminism (the most funded brand of feminism) the key definers of what feminism
is. The net result has been a feminist analysis “short of social, political and
economic context.”

This is why I emphasize
the imperial political context, but Tax purposely distorts that to say that for
“the Antis, the only struggle that counts is the one
against imperial imagery.” Rather than engage seriously in an honest debate,
Tax prefers to create a straw person that she then proceeds to attack.

She argues that I see no need to “focus on secondary issues like Islamism.” If I thought so,
I would not have spent two chapters of my book on Islamophobia discussing Islamism and the attitude that leftists should
take towards them. Had Tax deigned to read my book, rather than cherry pick
arguments, she might have learned that I have a nuanced approach to Islamism. In
chapter four, I outline the part played by the US in fomenting political Islam.
Viewed as a bulwark against secular nationalism and the left, the US supported,
funded, and trained Islamists in a range of countries. In chapter six, I look
at the local conditions that allowed Islamists to grow such as the failure of
secular nationalists and the left to adequately address political and economic
crises.

Tax, however,
chooses not only to distort my analysis she also conveniently omits the part
played by the US
in bolstering Islamism. This omission is arguably intentional since for Tax,
and for liberal imperialists, the emphasis has been on equating the parties of
political Islam with Nazi fascism. While Islamists like ISIS and the Taliban
are indeed horrific in their brutality, such an ahistoric parallel with the
Nazis is analytically deficient, doing nothing to arm activists with the
analysis they need to counter Islamists. Its ultimate goal is fear mongering
that paves the way for Western military intervention.

It is curious why Tax
chose to direct her ire at myself and Saadia. Perhaps because I am a Marxist
and publish in socialist outlets, Tax believes she can use tired red baiting
arguments to discredit me. Or perhaps what irked Tax is that my piece on
openDemocracy was listed as “most popular” receiving extensive readership (just
as other series critiquing liberalism on openDemocracy from a left perspective
have been hugely successful). What I infer from this is that a new generation
of thinkers and activists are actively seeking a larger framework than what
liberals like Tax can provide—a structural analysis of capital and empire—as
the basis from which to understand and fight racism, sexism and various forms
of oppression and exploitation. I welcome this development and hope to continue
contributing towards a productive discussion and debate. We have a world to
win.

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